Steve Perry’s Promise to Late Girlfriend Helped Bring Him Back to Music

Steve Perry revealed that his late girlfriend, Kellie Nash, made him promise not to return to “isolation” if anything happened and they weren’t together anymore.

The former Journey singer had spent nearly two decades out of the spotlight by the time he met psychologist Nash, but she died of cancer 18 months after their relationship commenced.

“She was fighting breast cancer when I met her for three years, and going through chemo, which was the only thing you could do back then,” Perry told Q104.3 in a recent interview. “I couldn’t separate myself from her – i wanted to be wherever she was. I lost her. We were together for a year and a half, and that year and a half felt like five, because it was so intense together.”

You can check out the interview below.

“One night we were talking and she said, ‘Honey, I need to ask you a question. … If something was to ever happen to me, make me a promise that you won’t go into isolation again. … I think it would make this all for naught.’ And I thought, ‘All for naught? That is such a huge statement,’" he recalled. "I mean, she’s looking at the arc of her life, and then meeting together, and then maybe us not being together, and her going. This like a huge, huge moment, and I just said, ‘I promise.’”

Since announcing his comeback album Traces, Perry has explained that he had lost his love for music while at the top of his game with Journey, and had considered the possibility that it would never return. In the new interview, he recalled how, after Nash died in 2012, he spent three years in “serious grieving” along with “psychological assistance from some professionals,” but noted that he had gotten "through that process and I started writing music. I think it opened my heart up again.”

Perry added that he hadn’t been able to force himself to speak at the funerals of his mother or grandmother, but found his voice for Nash’s memorial. “I got up there and I just said, ‘When I met Kelly I felt like I was the luckiest guy in the world,’" he said. "I had done some cool things in my life … but I gotta tell you, it dwarfed in comparison to meeting this girl.”